Memorial Stadium in Baltimore was the place baseball icon Cal Ripken Jr. made his major-league debut, knocked his first homer and stole his first base.

Now, the 48-year-old Hall of Famer and Oriole legend wants to recreate those memories by developing a new baseball field at that same 33rd Street address for the neighborhood’s at-risk youth.

The proposed project is part of an ambitious $5 million plan the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation is embarking on to build five youth sports complexes in five Baltimore neighborhoods.

To cover the costs of constructing the fields, the Ripken family — and another Oriole great, Brooks Robinson — are asking Baltimore’s business community, foundations and industrialists to chip in with critical sponsorship dollars during a deepening recession. The foundation is looking to partner with local nonprofits and city agencies to identify sites for the complexes expected to serve as a catalyst for redevelopment in low-income neighborhoods.

Besides Memorial Stadium, the only other site the foundation has committed to is in Northwest Baltimore’s Park Heights neighborhood. It also is eyeing Patterson Park for a field.

Flanked by a 55,000-square-foot YMCA and 340-unit senior housing development, the 2-acre Memorial Stadium site will be the flagship park of the five Baltimore sites. Work on the project, expected to cost $1.5 million, could begin by the end of this year and be complete by early 2011.

The success of the Baltimore projects could spur Ripken to take the campaign to 29 other cities across the U.S. with big-league baseball teams in an attempt to provide a similar spark to needy neighborhoods in those towns.

“There’s no better place to start than here in Baltimore at the old Memorial Stadium and really convince other communities of the value,” Ripken said.

‘In it for the long haul’

Cal and brother Bill presented their “Swing for the Future” campaign plans to more than 60 Baltimore business leaders at a breakfast fundraising event Feb. 26. Baltimore businessman Francis X. Kelly Jr. will chair the campaign. Cal and Bill Ripken and Robinson are acting as honorary co-chairs.

Securing the $5 million will not come without challenges, fundraising experts say. In general, fundraising is down along with the economy.

The needed money will serve as the most important piece of getting the first project started. The foundation will not begin work on the Memorial Stadium site until the initial $1.5 million cost of the project is raised.

Sponsorships involving naming-rights opportunities from bleachers to the entire field range from $10,000 to $500,000.

To date, Owings Mills-based health insurer CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield is the only company committed to a sponsorship. The Ripken campaign meets one of CareFirst’s charitable giving initiatives of improving health and wellness, said Jeff Valentine, a company spokesman. CareFirst has committed $100,000, he said.

The Ripkens will also contribute $500,000 to the campaign. Terry M. Rubenstein, an executive with the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds, told the Ripkens at the Feb. 26 event the foundation will make a donation to the campaign on some level.

Despite companies trimming back on spending and giving, the Ripken name should help in raising the needed cash.

“Clearly with the Ripken Foundation behind this there’s a well-known strong leadership presence,” said Vincent F. Connelly, president of Connelly & Associates Fundraising LLC in Baltimore. “Even in a tough economy, I think that leadership could make a significant difference for them. If the Ripken family wasn’t involved it would definitely be tough.”

Connelly, who advises nonprofits on fundraising campaigns, said the poor economy will still force the foundation to “dig a little deeper” for contributions.

Cal said he is optimistic about the fundraising, and if there are some delays, it should not prevent the project from happening eventually.

“However long it takes, that’s however long we’re going to be at it,” he said. “We’re in it for the long haul.”

Diamonds in the rough

At each Baltimore project, the Ripken Sr. Foundation will partner with a nonprofit in the neighborhood.

For example, at the former Memorial Stadium site — now known as Stadium Place — the field has been donated to Ripken by the adjacent Y of Central Maryland. The Ripken Foundation will raise the money, manage the construction and then gift the park to the local partner, in this case the Y.

The Y of Central Maryland has been looking to revamp the unattended dirt field for several years, CEO John Hoey said.

The home plate and batter’s box at the Ripken field will be at the exact same location where Oriole players dug in their feet for 37 years.

But the five parks across the city will feature more than baseball.

The plan is to build artificial synthetic surfaces that cost less to maintain than natural grass fields and can easily be converted into space for football, soccer and lacrosse.

“We use baseball because it’s what we know,” Bill Ripken said. “But there’s no sense in just putting in a baseball-only field when you can carve out other spaces and others avenues for kids to use.”

The Park Heights location at the C.C. Jackson Recreation Center will be in partnership with the Boys and Girls Club of America and on land owned by the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks.

The city’s Department of Parks and Recreation is interested in partnering with Ripken on two of the projects and has written a letter of support to Maryland’s Program Open Space initiative, an agency spokeswoman said. The Open Space program awards grants for projects centered around green-space developments.

The youth complexes should mirror similar ball fields that have been built throughout suburban Baltimore neighborhoods, such as Seminary Park in Lutherville, Cal said.

“We want to give these kids the same thing other kids have,” said Steve Salem, executive director of the Ripken Sr. Foundation. “They’ve been left behind before. They don’t have much of anything so we want to give them something they can be proud of and take ownership in.”

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